An extremist, not a fanatic

May 11, 2008

Twice in the space of a few days the government has over-ruled the recommendations of its expert advisors- on prisoners’ pay and on the classification of cannabis.Which raises the question: what role should empirical evidence have in policy-making? Here’s a theory - very little. Evidence-based policy-making (EBPM) is a sham. I say so for four reasons:1. It’s undemocratic. The evidence might tell us that tough sanctions against cannabis use are counter-productive in cost-benefit terms. But the public seem to want such sanctions. And they are not necessarily irrational to do so. Instrumental rationality isn’t all that matters. So does symbolic rationality. Being “tough on drugs” symbolizes the sort of people we are: clean, self-disciplined, sober. It might be important to demonstrate this, even if it is costly to do so. EBPM is wrong to assume that utilitarianism is the only standard by which to judge policy.2. Evidence is often unavailable for policies whose main justification is the long-term effect they’ll have. Would a roll-back of the welfare state lead to an end of a culture of dependency? Would greater democracy lead to a more energetic and socially-engaged citizenry? Compelling evidence on these questions is lacking - and would be for years even if such policies were implemented - because it would take decades for these effects to be felt, as it can take generations for social norms to change. EBPM therefore has a bias towards incremental changes to the status quo. It’s small-c conservative.3. Evidence is little help in policies designed to tackle low-frequency events. It’s now widely thought that the UK’s banking regulation policy has been inadequate since 1997. But we went 10 years without realizing this, simply because the test of it - a banking failure - didn’t happen until Northern Rock collapsed. Evidence can only inform banking regulation by telling us how we could have stopped the last failure. Or take another example - anti-terrorist legislation. There’s no evidence that banging suspects up for 42 days without charge would prevent terrorist attacks. But is this because the policy is useless? Or is it because there have been so few attempted attacks anyway? On the evidence, we can’t tell.4. EBPM cannot adjudicate between values: liberty vs. security, or equality vs. prosperity, say. At best, it can only tell us the costs of the choice. Herein, I think, lies the real damage that EBPM can do. In the wrong hands - and policy-making is usually in the wrong hands - it can be used as a way to disguise what is really a value judgement: supporters of the “20 reasons for 20 weeks” campaign are accused of doing just this.But the fact is that policy-making must be about choices of values, usually in conditions where evidence is missing or inconclusive. Politics cannot be a pure science, guided merely by facts, logic and evidence. And insofar as EBPM pretends otherwise, it does violence to the very meaning of politics.

May 04, 2008

The post-mortems - the mot juste, I think - on New Labour have missed a point. The party is paying the price for the fact that the New Labour project was based upon profound, and now crippling, intellectual insecurity.Put yourself in the shoes of New Labour’s founders in the 80s and early 90s. You see that traditional social democratic arguments for redistribution don’t work. You see Labour’s traditional support base, the manual working class, declining in numbers (pdf). And you see a managerial class winning what you want - wealth and power.What do you do? You abandon traditional Labourism, in favour of an appeal to Mondeo man and Worcester woman. You retain a vestigial belief in income redistribution but defend it only because it is the partner of economic efficiency, rather than a goal in its own right, and you pursue it through stealth taxes and complicated tax credits for working families. And you adopt a cringing deference towards the managerial class, believing it should be free of burdensome taxes whilst having the ability to deliver top-down reform of the public services.What we’re now seeing is the collapse of this strategy. The 10p tax fiasco arose from a disregard of the interests of that supposedly shrinking core Labour constituency, the (childless) low paid, and Brown’s belief that meddling with a complex tax system was a substitute for explicit arguing for redistribution. And the pursuit of median voters has led to a collapse in Labour’s support in its heartlands; as Hopi points out, Labour’s losses were especially bad in south Wales.Worse still, this strategy of insecurity means Brown cannot use at least three potentially popular narratives:1. Many big-earners aren’t as smart as they think, and are just overpaid, as Mervyn King has said. So maybe we should tax them more. 2. It’s time to simplify the tax system. Replacing tax credits with a citizen’s basic income could be just as egalitarian, but easier to administer and with lower marginal tax rates on the low paid.3. The idea that everything can be managed from the centre is an illusion - we just don’t have that much managerial skill. It’s time to trust workers and markets, not bosses.The tragedy - well, I think it’s a tragedy - is that the death of the strategy of insecurity has led to a vacuum on the Left, with the Tories alone capable of adopting, perhaps insincerely, these narratives.

April 27, 2008

Like Gracchi, I’m irked by Foreign Policy’s search for top public intellectuals. If we’re looking merely for the most influential living thinkers, surely Paul Samuelson, Frank Hahn and Kenneth Arrow - the founders of modern neoclassical economics - should be ahead of Steve Levitt or non-entities like Jacques Attali or Yegor Gaidar. And why on earth would Gary Becker, James Buchanan, John Roemer, Jon Elster, Alasdair MacIntyre or Ronald Dworkin, to name but the obvious few, not make the top 100?The problem is that Foreign Policy isn’t looking for merely great thinkers - as a glance at its list demonstrates. It wants ones who are “still active in public life.” But being active in public life and being an intellectual are, if not mutually exclusive, then at least very different things.To be very prominent in public affairs requires a dogmatism and capacity for soundbites that sits uneasily with the doubts and humble pursuit of “truth” that mark a true intellectual. And many proper intellectuals might reasonably shy away from the crude, ego-driven world of “public life.” As Macintyre said in concluding After Virtue, the task of intellectuals (and others) should be not to shore up the imperium, but to construct new forms of community in which civilized moral life can survive against the barbarism of our rulers.

April 14, 2008

One of my favourite quotes is that of Kenneth Boulding: "All organizational structures tend to produce false images in the decision-maker." Two recent examples show his point.First, Jack Straw "has let it be known" (as journos say) that he has doubts about Brown's plans to bang up Muslims for 42 days without charge, but plans to vote for the measure anyway.In doing this, Straw was probably thinking that this was a way to placate both his constitutents and the PM. But in fact, we just think: "what a slimy duplicitous unprincipled little bastard - Ed Balls is right for once."Then there's this letter to the Times from one Alastair Campbell praising Terminal 5.When we read this, do we think: "T5 isn't as bad as thought"? No. We think: "This is the Alastair Campbell who worked with Tom Kelly in Downing Street, probably using him to do his dirty work. And Tom Kelly is now head of PR at BAA. So Campbell's just returning a little favour." But neither Straw nor Campbell seem aware of these reactions. Instead, they persist in the idiotic illusion that we believe what they say. They don't realize they have negative credibility - many statements only become plausible once the likes of Campbell and Straw deny them.And here's what puzzles me. Why do they continue to do this? Is is because they're too thick to realize what the public think of them? Or is that they know but have become so corrupted by power that they just don't care? Or is that that they do know and do care, but just have no idea how to behave differently?

April 07, 2008

There is a case for paying politicians well, according to this new paper on the effects of variations in salaries paid to local politicians in Brazil:

We find that among municipalities that offer higher wages more educated candidates run for office...Higher wages also encourage politicians to stay in office longer resulting in a higher share of experienced legislators...Wages also affect politicians' performance. Among municipalities that offer higher wages, politicians submit and approve more legislative bills. This is consistent with an increase in effort induced by the higher future value of holding office....Legislators also signal effort by providing petitions for public works and improvement in public services for their voters. We find that in municipalities with higher salaries, there is an increase in the number of schools, local clinics and an improvement in their infrastructure.

Even if we take all this at face value, though, there are some problems here.1. Do we want politicians to do more? It's a natural tendency for people on high salaries to want to keep busy to justify such salaries. But activity isn't the same as productivity. There's much to be said for doing nothing.2. If the cost of job loss is higher, politicians will have more incentive to pander to the median voter rather than follow their own principles and wisdom. If the median voter is a fool, this will produce worse governance. 3. Do we really want talented people to be taken away from jobs where they can do good merely so they can enter politics?4. MPs' pay doesn't come only from the tax-payer. It comes from the private firms who pay MPs to be directors or consultants. And this pay-off is big. This paper estimates that a Conservative candidate who became an MP died twice as rich as Conservative candidates who lost their elections, because being an MP gave access to directorships and consultancy work.

April 03, 2008

It’s generally thought that the left has a problem with religion. Whereas some, like Seamus Milne, Brendan O’Neill or Madeleine Bunting see it as a potential ally of radical change, others, most obviously Chris Hitchens, see it as a force for reaction. But I’ve a theory - what the left is divided about is not so much religion as rationality. The left’s attitude to religion is confused because, ever since at least William Blake, it has had a deeply ambiguous attitude towards scientific rationality.The atheistic left argument is something like this:

Don’t believe what authority figures like priests tell you. Look at the evidence of your own eyes - this tells us there is no God. And what’s more, we don’t need to believe in God. Reason, logic and evidence alone can unlock the secrets of the universe. What’s more, reason is the friend of progress and liberty. Since scientists broke free of the tyranny of the Church and used rationality instead of appeals to authority, we have become vastly richer and more civilized. And because people have a capacity for reason, liberty of thought and speech can promote well-being by bringing us closer to the truth.

There are, however, powerful criticisms of this view:1. Left to themselves, people can’t think rationally - as Richard Dawkins himself has sometimes shown. Science has progressed not because of the rationality of individual scientists, but because there is an institutional framework and tradition - openness, peer review, the ability to build upon past discoveries - which encourages progress. Which raises the question. If science needs an institutional framework in order to direct the fallible human mind towards the proper growth of knowledge, mightn’t we also need such frameworks to help us with our moral and political reasoning? One such framework - as Augustine of Hippo stressed - might just be a belief in God and acquiescence to Church authority. 2. “Reason” is not ethically neutral. Instead, appeals to reason are often ways to legitimate power. We are expected to subordinate ourselves to bosses, capitalism or the state because these claim to be “rational.” Also, rationality invites us to prioritize what can be quantified and controlled over what cannot be. Blake’s criticism of Newton for being blind to imagination, Dickens of Gradgrind’s view that a horse is a graminivorous quadruped and the left’s attack on Wal-Mart for destroying communities are all part of the same tradition.3. Reason doesn’t help us solve serious disputes. When people argue from different premises, rationality (in the sense of conventional rules of logic and statistical inference) just doesn’t work. To have a rational debate, we need some shared presumptions. Which is why the debate between Dawkins and the religious is just pointlessly shrill. 4. Rationality, at least in its instrumental sense, is insufficient foundation for morality. It cannot answer the question: “what is a good life?” because, as Hume said, reason can only ever be the slave of the passions. Moral thinking, as AlasdairMacIntyreargued, requires a different conception of rationality . Now, I suspect that many on the left are sympathetic towards religion (whether they believe in God or not) because they are swayed by criticisms such as these.And here’s my problem. I too think there’s something in these criticisms. What worries me is that the space between scepticism about instrumental rationality on the one hand and an embrace of religious obscurantism on the other is shrinking.

March 13, 2008

In an ideal world, politicians and their advisers would be able to
talk openly about their real thoughts on trade or Iraq – and admit to
doubts or disagreements. That would be an adult way to conduct debates.
But it would also be politically impossible.In the real world,
“off the record” is the next best thing. If this journalistic
convention were simply abolished, political debate would become even
more cautious, simplistic and dishonest.

This takes for granted precisely what should be questioned. Why should adult debate be politically impossible?A big part of the blame for this lies with Gideon's fellow journalists. They present doubt and disagreement as indecisiveness, incompetence and splits - not as what they are, which is a mature acknowledgement of the complexity of human affairs.And they have a vested interest in off the record briefings. These give the select journalists who have privileged access an informational edge, which keeps them in work. If politics were wholly open, they'd have to think and research for themselves - which would put a lot of them on the dole. This is why so many of us hold the MSM in such contempt. It acts as a filter, kicking out of politics good intelligent people like Ms Power whilst promoting vacuous managerialists who can play by the rules.In this sense, the MSM acts in the opposite way to markets. The great virtue of markets is that they (sometimes) weed out idiots and incompetents; firms who sell over-priced crap eventually go bust. But thanks to the MSM, the opposite happens in politics; it's those who offer quality who get booted out.

March 11, 2008

At a time when the boom in commodity prices signals that the world's resources are getting scarcer, we should note that there's one commodity that's still in super-abundance - the sheer jaw-dropping imbecility of our rulers:

Lord Goldsmith suggested that schoolchildren should swear oaths of
allegiance in a bid to tackle a "diminution in national pride".

There's one thing to be said for this. It's a great university entrance test. Any student who, when asked to swear such an oath, fails to use the words "shove" and "arse" should be declared unfit for higher education. What Goldsmith fails to see is that this would be counter-productive. One reason why some of us still have vestigial pride in our country is precisely that we don't go in for such posturing.And if you force a youngster to choose allegiance between the UK and - let's be honest - Pakistan, you'll only risk a backlash; has this idiot never heard of the power of counter-suggestion?Insofar as a diminution in national pride is a problem, why doesn't Goldsmith consider Edmund Burke's solution?:

There ought to be a system of manners in every nation, which a
well-formed mind would be disposed to relish. To make us love our
country, our country ought to be lovely.

But then, as this government has done so much to make our country unlovely, this would be asking too much.

March 09, 2008

Swelling numbers seem to expect the same sort of service from Westminster as they get from Starbucks—to choose their policies in the same way as they choose the toppings on a cappuccino (a sprinkling of low taxation, please, with a referendum on the side). They demand a kind of personal satisfaction that government, with its conflicting priorities, can't deliver.

This is careless. It's not conflicting priorities that stops government offering Starbucks-type choices, but rather politicians' misplaced arrogance that they, not the people, should have power. There is evidence that where people have more choice in politics, through more direct democracy, they do have higher levels of satisfaction.Imagine how bad coffee providers would be if the only way we could choose between them was to select every four or five years whether we'd get our coffee from Starbucks or Costa, with the winner setting prices and deciding what we'd get every day.Why should we have to buy only job lots? Why can't we pick and choose policies through referenda? The arguments against this are perhaps weaker now than ever before. Maybe there was a time when politicians were better placed than us to decide what's good for us. But that time has passed. They are neither representative of us - being drawn from a narrow cadre of career politicians - nor obviously better informed or more expert. What's more, the narrowness of their backgrounds, allied to the whipping system, means that politicians beliefs are highly correlated, thus depriving us of a key condition for the wisdom of crowds to work.Bagehot continues, claiming that where direct democracy has been tried, such as in California, "the results have been chaotic." This too is crude. It ignores evidence (pdf) that direct democracy does work. It also omits to consider whether California's problems aren't instead the result of giving weight to cheap preferences, a problem which could be solved by demand-revealingreferenda.And anyway, give me the people's chaos over politicians' order any time.

March 06, 2008

How do we reconcile commitment to common nationhood whilst celebrating difference and diversity?

This strikes me as weird. I no more feel a commitment to my nation than a fish feels committed to being wet. And celebrating diversity makes as much sense as celebrating language or opposable thumbs.So, why is Hodge making an issue of something I take for granted. Here are some (non-exhaustive) possibilities:1. We see immigration differently. As a Leicester lad, immigration for me happened back in the early 70s. The problems raised by immigration are like kipper ties or Mark III Cortinas - quaint historic curiosities. By contrast, although Hodge is an immigration herself, she sees migration as a new thing:

[Barking has] moved in the 14 years since I’ve been the MP, from a place where I had never met so many great grandmothers who lived within 10 minutes’ walk of their great grandchildren to an area where typically in one primary school, the cohort of children from BME communities rose from 26% to 40% in just one year.

To Hodge, then, the disequilibrium effects of immigration loom large, whereas to me the longer-term benefits are more obvious. 2. Hodge's illiberal instincts stop here seeing the obvious - that a common nationhood and diversity can be achieved simply by liberty and the rule of law; had she paid more attention to the last night of the proms, she'd have heard something about the "mother of the free."Diversity and nationhood are problems because the government is making them so.3. These same illiberal instincts mean she doesn't have the instinctive love of diversity that liberals do. There's something puzzling about New Labour calling on us to celebrate diversity whilst at the same time wishing to turn us all into a more homogenous type: slim,ambitious,prudent, and sober. When Hodge says "celebrate diversity" it's a message to herself, rather like Basil Fawlty's "don't mention the war" - with the same effect. 4. "Diversity" is an issue for people like Hodge because they have the choice of escaping it or not*. As Andrew Anthony said:

The liberal arts community, for all its eloquence in anti-racism, is far more inclined to retreat to private schools and affluent enclaves, the better to maintain a homogenous culture while pronouncing on the benefits of diversity.

Others, of course, lack this choice, so just have to live with diversity.So, am I missing something here? Is there a dog whistle I'm not hearing? Or - to change the metaphor clunkily - an elephant in the room I'm not seeing?* OK, I too live in homogenous areas - Belsize Park and Oakham - but this isn't because I'm trying to escape "diversity".